DEAR DR. GRAHAM: This couple keeps coming to our house and inviting us to come to their assembly hall to study the Bible. I'd like to know something about the Bible, but a friend of mine says this group is a cult. What exactly is a cult? They seem like nice people. -- D.B.F.

DEAR D.B.F.: A cult is a group that claims that it, and it alone, has the truth about God and offers the only way to salvation. Members reject what Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years, and substitute instead their own beliefs for the clear teachings of the Bible.

Often, they add to the Bible by claiming that the books their founder wrote or "discovered" are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible. In reality, however, those books deny what the Bible says about God or Jesus, or about the way of salvation. The particular group you mention elsewhere in your letter uses its own "translation" of the Bible, which changes what the Bible actually says at certain key points. The Bible warns that before Christ's return many people "will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths" (2 Timothy 4:4).

Of course it depends on HOW you define the 'truth of the Bible.' Jehovah's Witnesses do indeed have their own translation of the Bible but I would say they are no more focused on that translation than KJV-Onlyists and they are probably not nearly so annoying!

_________________"If the cross is the sign of anything, it's the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world's problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing." Robert Farrar Capon